We solve hard data collection problems
Reliable web and mobile scraping for platforms that require deep reverse engineering.
What we do & why
What we build
We build production-grade scrapers for complex e-commerce platforms, covering both websites and mobile applications.
By “complex,” we mean platforms that actively resist automation: advanced anti-bot systems, fingerprinting, obfuscated client logic, mobile-only APIs, and rapidly changing behaviors. Our work goes far beyond basic HTTP scraping and often involves deep reverse engineering, long-term maintenance, and custom tooling.
Our focus today is on major e-commerce platforms in Southeast Asia, where scale, diversity, and technical defenses make reliable data collection especially challenging. Over time, we plan to expand both geographically and into other data-intensive industries, while keeping the same technical standards.
What we intentionally don’t do
We do not build analytics dashboards, market reports, or business intelligence products.
Instead, we deliberately focus on data collection and data reliability. We believe that building products and insights on top of data requires a different mindset, different feedback loops, and a different company culture.
For this reason, we prefer to partner with teams who turn data into value: market intelligence platforms, consulting firms, agencies, and internal analytics teams. We focus on making sure the underlying data is accurate, fresh, and delivered at scale.
- Why this problem matters
- Modern platforms actively block automation (anti-bot, fingerprinting, obfuscation, mobile-only APIs)
- Reliable scraping requires long-term R&D and reverse engineering
- What our customers get
- Reliable data pipelines in hostile environments
- Clear communication about performance & incidents, and a long-term technical partner
- Who we work with
- Market intelligence & data platforms
- Brands, agencies, and e-commerce operators
- Teams running large-scale monitoring and analytics
Our values
These values describe how we make technical and business decisions, how we work with customers, and what we expect from ourselves as a team.
- Quality over speed
- We prefer building things properly rather than moving fast with fragile solutions. Strong foundations and maintainable systems matter more to us than short-term wins.
- Transparency
- We communicate directly and honestly. With customers, this means being clear about pricing, performance, and incidents; internally, it means being open about numbers, including revenue, salaries, and bonuses.
- Perseverance on hard problems
- Complex platforms require time and persistence. We invest the effort needed to understand problems deeply and are comfortable spending months (or longer) on R&D to solve them properly.
- Freedom, trust, and ownership
- We trust engineers to work without micromanagement. People have ownership of their projects, freedom in technical choices, and incentives linked to real business results, in a fully remote and mostly asynchronous setup.
Our team
We are a small engineering team focused on solving difficult data collection problems. We work closely together and stay hands-on with the systems we build and operate.
Marc Plouhinec
Founder & CEO
Marc is a software engineer with over 15 years of experience building and operating large-scale systems. After working at Lazada (Alibaba Group), he founded Charted Sea to focus on long-term, reliable scraping solutions for complex e-commerce platforms. He works on system architecture, scraper design, infrastructure, and technical decisions with customers.
Huang Yongchao
Reverse Engineer
Yongchao is a reverse engineer specialized in anti-bot and client-side protections. Before joining Charted Sea, he broke defenses used by vendors such as Akamai and Cloudflare. At Charted Sea, he reverse engineers web and Android platforms, deobfuscates protected JavaScript, and reconstructs anti-bot algorithms into production-ready implementations.
Join us
We are always interested in working with engineers who enjoy hard technical problems and long-term ownership. Our work involves reverse engineering, distributed systems, and production-grade scraping in hostile environments.
We are a fully remote, mostly asynchronous team. We expect a working overlap of at least 4 hours with UTC+8, but otherwise give people freedom in how and where they work. We value autonomy, clear communication, and engineers who prefer understanding systems deeply rather than working around them.
Engineers we’re looking for
- Full-stack engineer (Rust & TypeScript)
- You would help extend our scraper orchestration platform, connect internal services to API marketplaces, and improve our customer-facing web dashboard. This role sits between infrastructure, backend systems, and product.
- Reverse engineer (TypeScript, Go, or Python)
- You would work on reverse engineering complex platforms such as Shopee or TikTok Shop, on both web and mobile. This includes analyzing obfuscated code, understanding anti-bot logic, and developing and maintaining scrapers that work at scale.
- Decompiler / program analysis engineer
- You would focus on lower-level tooling: disassemblers and decompilers for JavaScript virtual machines, semantic diffing, AST transformations, and related analysis tools used to understand heavily protected code.
Interested ?
If this sounds like the kind of problems you want to work on, feel free to reach out by email or on Discord, even if you don’t match one role perfectly.